HELATING TO SECONDARY SEXUAL CHARACTERS. 17 



birds pass through a stage when they produce an internal secretion 

 that disappears later. But it is also possible, and perhaps more 

 probable, that the young birds, not cock-feathered, have remained 

 longer in the juvenile stage than the others, so that they might be said 

 to be falsely hen-feathered. 



The results pubhshed by the Rev. E. Lewis Jones in 1914, describing 

 crosses between two breeds of Campines, one called Belgian (which 

 has hen-feathered males), the other English (that has cock-feathered 

 males), are summarized in the table on page 16. They show the domi- 

 nance of hen-feathering with some probabihty. The table given there 

 is the original, to which the author has kindly added the numbers here 

 prefixed to some of the classes. The numbers are not large enough in 

 all cases to be satisfactory, but the dominance of the hen-feathering 

 is, I think, apparent, as well as its non-sex-linked transmission. The 

 golden female in C must have been English type, or at any rate hetero- 

 zygous for English-tjrpe feathering, for if Belgian her sons would have 

 been Belgian type. 



Punnett and Bailey (1914) have published the result of a cross with 

 hen-feathered Silver Sebrights and Hamburgs. The dominance of 

 hen-feathering in the male is shown in the figures that illustrate their 

 paper, but as the paper deals solely with the inheritance of weight the 

 account of inheritance of hen-feathering was deferred to a later paper, 

 that has not yet appeared. 



HEREDITY OF COLOR IN THE CROSS BETWEEN SEBRIGHT AND 

 BLACK-BREASTED GAME BANTAM. 



The cross between the Sebright and the Black-Breasted Game 

 bantam was undertaken primarily to study the inheritance of hen- 

 feathering. The Sebright was chosen, on the one hand, because this 

 race is pure for hen-feathering, whereas in other races, such as the 

 Campines, both kinds of males are known. The hen-feathered birds 

 of such races are, I beUeve, frequently not pure for hen-feathering. The 

 game race was chosen because the cock has the typical plumage of the 

 wild bird, Gallus bankiva, and although his feathers are remarkably 

 short, they show the characteristic cock-feathered type. 



Only secondarily was the experiment concerned with color inheri- 

 tance. The two breeds differ so markedly in coloration and pattern 

 that the very complex results that appeared in Fz were to be expected. 

 In addition to the differences involving hen-feathering versus cock- 

 feathering, and Sebright plumage versus game plumage, the game is 

 strongly dimorphic in the plumage, while in the Sebright the colora- 

 tion of the two sexes is closely similar. But the castration experiments 

 have shown that this difference is the result of hen-feathering in the 

 Sebright cock, and that the race carries the same potential dimorphism 

 as do other races of poultry. 



